Suárez-Pellicioni Macarena, Núñez-Peña Maria Isabel, Colomé Àngels
Department of Behavioural Sciences Methods, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain ; Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain.
Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain ; Department of Basic Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2015 Oct 19;6:1577. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01577. eCollection 2015.
Attentional bias toward threatening or emotional information is considered a cognitive marker of anxiety, and it has been described in various clinical and subclinical populations. This study used an emotional Stroop task to investigate whether math anxiety is characterized by an attentional bias toward math-related words. Two previous studies failed to observe such an effect in math-anxious individuals, although the authors acknowledged certain methodological limitations that the present study seeks to avoid. Twenty high math-anxious (HMA) and 20 low math-anxious (LMA) individuals were presented with an emotional Stroop task including math-related and neutral words. Participants in the two groups did not differ in trait anxiety or depression. We found that the HMA group showed slower response times to math-related words than to neutral words, as well as a greater attentional bias (math-related - neutral difference score) than the LMA one, which constitutes the first demonstration of an attentional bias toward math-related words in HMA individuals.
对威胁性或情感性信息的注意偏向被认为是焦虑的一种认知标志，并且在各种临床和亚临床人群中都有描述。本研究使用情绪斯特鲁普任务来调查数学焦虑是否具有对与数学相关词汇的注意偏向这一特征。之前的两项研究未能在数学焦虑个体中观察到这种效应，尽管作者承认了本研究试图避免的某些方法学局限性。20名高数学焦虑（HMA）个体和20名低数学焦虑（LMA）个体参与了一项包含与数学相关和中性词汇的情绪斯特鲁普任务。两组参与者在特质焦虑或抑郁方面没有差异。我们发现，HMA组对与数学相关词汇的反应时间比对中性词汇的反应时间更长，并且比LMA组有更大程度的注意偏向（与数学相关词汇的得分减去中性词汇的得分），这首次证明了HMA个体对与数学相关词汇存在注意偏向。
